Starship Asterisk*

South African National Research Foundation http://www.nrf.ac.za/media-room/news/salt-helps-study-new-nova-200-000-light-years-earth SALT helps study new nova 200 000 light years from Earth [...]The new study led by Elias Aydi, a PhD student jointly affiliated with the South African Astronomical Obs...

Recent update from Konstantin Batygin on developments in a theory to underly the Planet Nine simulations: http://www.findplanetnine.com/2017/10/theory.html [...]Planet Nine is invoked to explain (1) physical clustering of distant Kuiper belt orbits, (2) the perihelion detachment of long-period KBOs ...

Here's one of the interviews featured in the space.com article (above), available on YouTube. Northwestern U astrophysicists and members of the LIGO collaboration Vicky Kalogera and Shane Larson https://youtube.com/watch?v=afugOlipGu4 Published on 11 Feb 2016 Vicky Kalogera, senior LIGO astrophysici...

These are the most recent posts on the dedicated, and detailed, blog that Batygin and Brown maintain regarding the search for planet 9. • 30 June 2017 http://www.findplanetnine.com/2017/06/ status update pt 1 by Konstantin Batygin • 2 July 2017 http://www.findplanetnine.com/2017/07/ status update pt...

https://www.space.com/38367-gravitational-wave-announcement-coming.html Gravitational- Wave Announcement Coming on Oct. 16: What Could It Be? By Calla Cofield, Space.com Senior Writer | October 5, 2017  [...] At a news conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yesterday, [Nobel] co-pr...

JPL did a nice resumé of the achievements of the Herschel Space Observatory https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6952 SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 Legacy of Herschel Space Observatory Assuming that Planet 9 is internally heated like Neptune and is running a temperature ~50 K HSO might have been use...

JPL did a nice resumé of the achievements of the Herschel Space Observatory

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6952
SEPTEMBER 22, 2017
Legacy of Herschel Space Observatory

ESA Rosetta
http://esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Sci ... exoplanets

The latest entry.
ESOblog - Red Dots: Open Notebook Science

http://www.eso.org/public/blog/red-dots ... ence/?lang

A conversation with Guillem Anglada-Escudé, the scientist who led the discovery of our closest exoplanet
29 September 2017

New Insights on Dark Energy Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Weekly Science Update | 2017 Sep 29 Dynamical Dark Energy in Light of the Latest Observations - Gong-Bo Zhao et al Nature Astronomy 1:627 (28 Aug 2017) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-017-0216-z arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1701.08165 > 27 Jan 2...

By pure chance I came across this video on YouTube of astrophysicist Brian Greene talking with Stephen Colbert (yes, that Stephen Colbert!) about supernovae. With a rather fun demo. I thought it might be of interest with this Apod. Brian Greene Explains The Most Powerful Explosions In The Universe -...

http://www.eso.org/public/blog/photographer-in-the-dark/?lang Photographer in the Dark Interview with ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek https://cdn.eso.org/images/thumb350x/petr_horalek.jpg 22 September 2017 Outreach@ESO What you’ll discover in this blog post: • How ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horále...

Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/european-det ... ve-1.22690

I like this sky map (via http://www.stfc.ac.uk/news/british-technology/ ) http://www.stfc.ac.uk/stfc/cache/file/A563D856-5A5E-4C5C-BA1E113B78FF8884.jpg Skymap showing how adding Virgo to LIGO helps in reducing the size of the source-likely region in the sky. (Credit: Giuseppe Greco (Virgo Urbino gro...

This is the text under the graphic, not legible in the screenshot: FIG. 3: Localization of GW170814. The rapid localization using data from the two LIGO sites is shown in yellow, with the inclusion of data from Virgo shown in green. The full Bayesian localization is shown in purple. The contours rep...

Screenshot_20170928-071506.png The rumours in August http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=37507 were of a neutron-neutron merger in NGC 4993 (in Hydra) Right ascension 13h 09m 47.2s Declination−23° 23′ 4″ However, the graphic in the discovery paper - http://ligo.org/detections/GW170814...

The paper is now up on arXiv A candidate sub-parsec binary black hole in the Seyfert galaxy NGC 7674 Preeti Kharb (NCRA-TIFR), Dharam Vir Lal (NCRA-TIFR), David Merritt (RIT) https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06258 Abstract: [...] The existence of binary supermassive black holes (SBHs) is predicted by mode...

Sky & Telescope article
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronom ... tango-yet/

Awww - ¡thank you, Geck!
I'd just come back to do it now that bystander has told me (reminded me...)how to do it!

The ESO blog topic dated 20 September 2017 has an interview about this facility


And here's an ESOcast video about AOF First Light

http://www.eso.org/public/blog/adaptive-optics-facility/ Behind the scenes of the Adaptive Optics Facility 15 September 2017 On the Ground What you’ll discover in this blog post: • Why astronomical observations are impacted by the Earth’s atmosphere • How adaptive optics works to improve our view o...

www.nature.com wrote: The rotation axis of the star is at a position angle of 79.5 ± 0.7°. Please! Those of you who understand math, what does this mean? A position angle of 79.5 ± 0.7°? Do we see Regulus "moderately pole on" or does Regulus mostly present its equator belly to us? Ann &qu...

The RIT link returned a page not found link at the Rochester site, tho this URL is the one they give on their Twitter announcement. (I've reported the broken link to them.)

The press release is available at phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-radio-gal ... black.html

http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/pressreleases/2017/8 Discovery of the most accelerated binary pulsar http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/3905107/standard_sans_both-1504710303.jpg MPIfR PhD student identifies record system within processed data September 06, 2017 Fifty years after Jocelyn Bell discovered the ...

Sky & Telescope have an article about this.
Shockwaves Light up Stellar Explosions
By: Javier Barbuzano | September 14, 2017
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronom ... ight-nova/